


only child of the universe, last of a dying breed

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Divergence, Galra Keith (Voltron), M/M, s2 divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-12
Updated: 2017-10-12
Packaged: 2019-01-16 13:10:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12343323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: “Wow,” Lance says, “The inside of your head iswild.I knew you were kind of extra, you know, it goes with, you know -”Here, he makes a gesture towards Keith’s whole everything.“No,” Keith says, “I don’t know. Also, shut up.”





	only child of the universe, last of a dying breed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pistolgrip](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pistolgrip/gifts).



If this was a story - something larger than Keith, something outside of his life - he’d have thrown the book halfway across his floor. The foreshadowing of it all was too obvious. The knife, the nightmares, the subtle knowing  - itching, ever-constant, in the back of his head like an allergy. Keith feels like he’s woken up halfway through a bad dream to find the dream is real. It’s that disorientating feeling of jerking awake midway through a horror film to find half the cast is dead and you never even noticed them going missing. He’s one bad apple in the basket, gone half-rotten amongst the ripe: the already-bitten kid in the zombie film, busy hiding the oncoming infection from everyone, telling himself the apocalypse is like the sunset. That is, still over the horizon - forgetting that the encroaching swallow of light is inevitable.  

“Wow,” Lance says, “The inside of your head is  _ wild.  _ I knew you were kind of extra, you know, it goes with, you know -” 

Here, he makes a gesture towards Keith’s whole everything.

“No,” Keith says, “I don’t know. Also, shut up.”

“Come on! You know, it’s,  _ you know. _ ” Here Lance makes the same incomprehensible gesture. It sweeps down Keith’s body in a way that sticks under his skin, like a splinter only good. Keith tries to shut it down with a glare and Lance with it, but Lance just shrugs it off. 

_Water off a duck’s back,_ Keith thinks wearily, and leans his head back against the wall of the Galra prison cell. The metal runs oddly warm. It sounds like it should be comforting, but the susurration of the heat is like quickening blood under the skin, so it’s honestly anything but. Keith closes his eyes. 

It’s gone like this: they’ve gotten picked off, picked apart from Voltron and picked up out of the sky, flailing in open space. At least their Lions are safe: Keith remembers hearing Red’s yell, something torn open, when he threw himself out and away from her. As long as they’ve only got him, they’ve got nothing. Just a boy took out of his time, a boy who’s never belonged: a mismatching boy, the truth of his blood never reaching the surface of his skin.  

“Are you pretending to be asleep?” Lance sticks out a bony foot and jabs Keith in the ribs. The shackle attached to his ankle - Keith can imagine it glowing faintly with the strain of movement - clatters against the floor. “Dude, not cool. We’re  _ conversing  _ here.”

“You can’t have a conversation if the other person isn’t replying, Lance,” Keith retorts, realises what he’s done, and immediately curses inwardly. 

“So you do admit we’re -”

“Look,” Keith’s aware he sounds tired now. And he is. It’s the sort of exhaustion that seems to be leaking, tacky with poison, out of his very bones. He can feel the questions fizzing in Lance’s head, can nearly taste the edge of them, like the way soda pops in your mouth. It’s not a large cell. If Keith moves any closer to his left, they’ll be touching - which is why he’s squashed up against the right wall like he’s hoping to phase through it. “Can you not? Aren’t you getting into my head enough without my help?” 

He’s aware he’s sounding nasty, but in the last twenty hours he’s been kidnapped, strung up, interrogated, and forced to listen to Lance non-stop - both because Lance hasn’t shut up once since they threw him in the cell alongside Keith, and because whatever that injection they’d given to Keith is doing, it seems to have been given to Lance as well. It’s the only explanation Keith has for why he keeps catching stray images of things he’s never seen, flashing behind his eyes every time he blinks like a zoetrope: his arm in a plaster cast, covered in a wash of felt tip names and smiley faces. A girl with a long French braid cartwheeling across a schoolyard. The taste of chlorine in his mouth, his eyes blurred by a wash of blue - at that point he realised what was happening, because Keith hasn’t ever learnt to swim. 

He hasn’t asked what Lance saw. He just knows Lance keeps eyeing him like something ready to bolt, something ready to bite off his own leg to get out of a trap - and Keith brings his knees up to his chest. He doesn’t open his eyes, he doesn’t look at Lance, and for a moment, everything is blissfully still.  

“Uh, sorry. I was just, you know -” Lance says, eventually. 

“No,” Keith snaps, “I keep saying, I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

“I was trying to be polite,” Lance finishes. He’s sounding confused, which is ridiculous. “I don’t want to - it’s your head, man. I don’t want to just be all up in there. It’s  _ rude. _ ” 

Keith blinks at him, because that - that doesn’t make any sense. It’s like if you’re given a front row seat at an Imax preview, all of it for free. If you’re getting to see the show for nothing, you don’t just walk out of the theatre. You don’t just turn your back. 

Silence. 

“So,” Lance begins  _ again.  _ This time,  Keith just resigns himself to it. “How long did you know you were kinda maybe Galra, then? Or, like, suspect?” 

Keith cracks enough to turn and look at Lance. He’s sitting cross-legged now, a tangle of elbows and knees and hips, still watching Keith very carefully. 

“I got the vibe it’s been a while,” Lance adds, because of course he does, Lance probably can’t help himself. 

“It’s been a while,” Keith allows. Lance whistles under his breath. 

“Wow,” he says, “That must’ve fucking sucked.” 

“Nice past tense.” 

“Nice deflecting but no dice,” Lance replies, voice even. “Have you got somewhere else you gotta be? Come on, I’m trying to relate here. ”

“You can’t,” Keith says, “Don’t bother.” 

Lance glances at Keith out of the corners of his eyes, then drops his gaze to his own feet and hums a little under his breath. 

“Yeah, okay. Okay, fair. I’ve never found out I was half-purple, so - I’m gonna let you have that one.” 

“Thanks,” Keith says, dry. “I’m not, but you tried.”  

“For real though, that’s -” When Keith glances his way, Lance is looking down, absently picking at the chain links of a shackle. “Hiding stuff. When you don’t want to. It’s - I don’t know, it’s a lot?” 

“Yeah,” Keith says. “Wow, you actually _are_ trying.” 

He finds himself biting back a smile. He doesn’t know how it happened, where it was hiding, only that Lance has tugged it up and out of him somehow. 

“I actually am!” Lance echoes, sounding wounded. The smile grows, a pressure in Keith’s chest he doesn’t let reach his face yet.  “And, like, it’s not as bad as you think!” 

“It’s pretty bad, Lance.” 

It’s the routine of it, Keith decides, the rhythm of needling Lance. It’s something familiar, something soothing in the upended chaos of Keith’s life - the world’s changed, gone out from under his feet again, and Lance is still the same he’s always been, down to the bone. He’s big enough to admit to himself it would’ve - if Lance had gone from his usual antagonism to something warier - something scared - it would've been - 

“I don’t mind!” Lance tells him, insistent, as though he’s seen something in Keith’s head. He probably has.

“But you don’t like me anyway,” Keith points out, quite reasonably in his opinion. 

“Who said I didn’t like you?!” Lance retorts. He spits it out with such vehemence, syllables ricocheting, that Keith is shocked. By the look on Lance’s face, he’s not the only one, but after a second, Lance blinks out of his stunned expression and repeats himself, quiet but somehow even fiercer still. “Who said I didn’t like you?” 

“Did you have to?” Keith can’t help but ask. Keith knows he isn’t the greatest at reading people, but Lance is an open book. Everyone knows it. 

“Yes!” Lance hisses at him, and the annoyed look on his face is familiar territory, back outside of that weird sniper focus face he’d just been pulling, all eyes and gutting intensity. 

Here’s the thing: Keith can imagine what it would be like. To not have Lance hate him, that is. The thought of it makes his stomach drop out each time. 

He can’t help but wonder what was in that injection. 

“You don’t believe me,” Lance says. His voice is oddly muted, given how every breath they take seems to ring out against the walls. “I’m saying that’s not how it is, but it doesn’t matter, huh? You don’t. Do you?”

He has no right to look even half as crushed as he does when Keith locks eyes back with him, but he does, because Lance always oversteps, crowds his way over every last line in the sand.

“Not really,” Keith admits. 

Keith is suddenly struck with a mental image of a pair of skinned knees, blood splotchy against the brown skin. The bubble of copper welling up and the sting of them: how it’s all hot behind his eyes, heavy in his throat. And then this: a girl with razored eyeliner and a scrape of a laugh, a smile like breaking windows, and everyone watching as she turns on her heel. Everyone in the whole canteen he’s never eaten in, even though he can smell the stale air clinging to the lump in his throat all the same. 

And then, this too: his own back, recognisable even through other eyes, striding away down the Castle’s corridor, getting ever smaller, ever farther away, ever more unreachable. 

The stars, after all, are only the memory of light, cold and long gone. Distant. 

Keith blinks back into his own body, and stares blankly at Lance. 

“Was that you or me?” he asks, his voice strangled, and Lance looks like it’s his turn to try and phase through the wall now. 

“It was an accident,” Lance mutters. 

They’re always going nowhere, the two of them. They’re always running in goddamn circles, always, and it’s the dumbest shit Keith has ever heard of, now he says it to himself, now he lets himself say it to himself. 

“Of course it was an accident,” Keith says, “You’re a walking disaster.” 

He stands up in a susurration of chains, links tumbling to the floor and catching taut, connected. He takes one step, struggling against the pull of them, then another. At his feet, Lance glares up, all scowl, all bravado. In his head, Keith can still feel the sting. 

“Says you,” Lance retorts. “You’re literally just as bad, actually, you’re probably worse. Now that I think about it - you know what, you’re _so much worse_. And it’s not the Galra thing, that’s like - whatever, it’s whatever, it’s because you’re you. You’re always getting up in my - you’re always getting in my head. Who do you even think you are, you know -” 

“No,” Keith says, leaning down, “I don’t know. I keep _ telling  _ you that,” and tries to kiss him. 

He manages to catch the corner of Lance’s lip, a bright smudge of warmth against his own mouth, before the chains finally reach their limit and there’s nothing left to give. He tips over, landing heavily on his outstretched hands, staring at Lance, who’s staring right back at him, eyes huge. 

There’s the crash of Keith landing. Then, there’s another, much bigger silence. 

“There you go,” Keith manages, what he’s done hitting him, trying to scrounge up some kind of cover story. “I don’t know who I think I am, okay? But - you’re - you’re just - actually, I don’t know why I did that. I guess I just - ”

“That’s -” Lance swallows, hard. “I know I keep saying this, I’m sure I keep saying this, because I can hear myself talking, but - I don’t not - it’s not that - it’s not that I don’t like you, yeah?” 

“I don’t not like you either,” Keith finds himself saying, thinking of Lance watching him walk away, thinking of the hollow feeling in his stomach, seeing the bigger picture all at once. 

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” 

“Okay.”

“Yeah.” 

“Cool.” 

There’s another silence. Keith notices Lance has his hand over his own mouth, pressing down on the same spot Keith had caught. In the half-darkness, his eyes are fixed on Keith, luminous. 

Fuck it. 

“I can try that again.” Keith is aware he’s still tangled up in the chains, a chaos of his own making, but he doesn’t feel ready to move away yet. There's nothing left to give. “If you want -”

“Yes,” Lance says, so fast the words are tripping over each other, “I mean, yes, obviously, yes, did I mention the part where that’s a yes -”

When Keith blinks, he isn’t seeing images so much as just a constant riot of colour. Again, he’s not sure whether it’s from him or Lance. It’s not bad, or if it is, they’re both as bad as each other anyway.

“Okay,” Keith says, grinning. “Yeah, the yes is noted. Also seconded.” 

“So that’s a thing, then.” Lance looks disbelieving, like Keith’s told him there’s snow falling in Varadero. Keith figures they can work on that. Probably later. 

“I don’t know about you," Keith manages, "But I’m sick of having my head messed with. How are we getting ourselves back home?”

Keith waits, watching the slow unfurl of Lance’s smile, all teeth in the dark. 

“There he is,” Lance says, “There you are,” and holds out his hand so they can help each other up.  


End file.
